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OmniClassics · Literature

Fifty years in Wall Street

Henry Clews

A financial insider recalls the personalities, crises, and speculative contests that shaped his experience of Wall Street.

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About the book

Henry Clews revises and enlarges an earlier memoir to cover fifty years of financial life. Personal encounters and market episodes are combined with reflections on national development, investment, speculation, and the conduct of powerful participants. The narrator writes as an active participant who wishes to explain events and defend judgments, so the volume is not an impartial economic history. Its descriptions are useful for understanding how one contemporary interpreted financial institutions and their relation to public life. They are historical material, not current investment guidance. Readers can follow the stories of confidence and panic while attending to the point at which explanation becomes self-justification, and to the differences between an individual's remembered experience and the wider consequences of the markets he describes.

  • Finance and power
  • Speculation
  • Insider memory

Why read it

For a vivid historical account of financial culture told by someone directly involved in its contests.

English financial memoir · revised and enlarged, 1908

Contents and reading sections